We aren’t huge fans of games, but this one has a “teachable moment” and a true reward for one lucky winner.

The rules are simple and the prize is flexible.

Let’s start with the prize: it’s a free license to OSP International’s PDU Podcast or the PMP Prepcast – excellent downloadable media products that help you keep your PMP Credential if you already have it, or earn it if you don’t yet have it.  The winner would be saving somewhere between $100 and $200!

Now let’s get to the rules.

As usual, we want each post – even a game – to be educational.  So with this post we expose one of the ideas from our book – the ‘green spectrum’ -  and ask you to comment on this post with a reaction that tells us:

• where you think your current project fits on this spectrum (choose one of the four points below)
• why you think it’s where it is (just a sentence or two)

Here you see a figure from our book, Green Project Management.  You’ll need to read the book for the juicy details.  Here’s a summary: we describe a spectrum of projects – from those that are “Green by Definition”, because the projects themselves have a deliverable related directly to sustainability – such as the turn up of a wind farm – to those projects which may not have any obvious connection to sustainability, like a new software release.  In the text, we describe the PM’s role in each of these four points along the spectrum.

We’re interested to know where you and your project sit on this spectrum.

Respond by answering the two questions above with a comment below, we’ll draw a winner by the end of September.

Continue reading…

A champion of green projects passed away suddenly August 7th.  Matt Simmons, well known for his views on peak oil in his book Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy apparently drown after suffering a heart attack.  Here in Maine, however, he was best known for championing green energy projects (Green By Definition from our book). He had big plans for some big projects, particularly trying to harness the ocean’s energy.  He founded The Ocean Energy Institute in Rockland, Maine, whose grand opening was in July, a “think tank” focused on tidal energy.  It is both a not-for-profit research facility coupled with a for-profit venture capital enterprise to fund the alternate energy.

From an article by Michael Corkery in today’s (Aug 9th) Wall Street Journal Blog, Matt Simmons is quoted as saying that, “When it comes to alternative energy, wind is perfectly commercial today. But when you try to scale it, it just doesn’t work. I suspect the cost of solar will finally come down, but you’ll never have solar be anything more than an intermittent source of electricity.” To him, the ocean was the logical place to capture energy.  In the same article he is quoted as saying “The Gulf Stream is essentially the largest river in the world … and there are devices being developed that are anchored in a current and end up having a rotor that turns because of the current. It might be perfectly viable to create a floating dry dock. Or you combine the water in a boiler with ammonia, and once you have boiling you have steam, and steam powers a turbine and creates electricity. This doesn’t sound nearly as complicated as creating fuels cells, for instance, which is still a real bugaboo.”

Matt believed that “Oceans are the last energy frontier, yet we know so little about how to harness them. The Ocean Energy Institute’s mission is to quickly fill this knowledge void and let our oceans supply us the energy that fossil fuels have provided for the last hundred years,” a direct quote.

A press release today from the Institute indicated that the work of the Institute will continue.  We hope so.  We didn’t know him personally, but he was on our list of “get to knows” because of the potential projects he was involved with.  We’ll be watching the work of the Institute, that’s for sure.  Matt Simmons was 67.

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We, project managers, love indices, benchmarks, or anything else we can use as a number for quantification.  When we, EarthPM, were researching our book, we looked for company facts and figures to show how much savings can be realized by greening your projects and greening your organizations.  We found this “index” that provides a measurement of how well the world does with sustainability as it relates to our well-being, something we are all concerned with.

According to the website http://www.happyplanetindex.org/ “The Happy Planet Index (HPI) is an innovative measure that shows the ecological efficiency with which human well-being is delivered around the world. It is the first ever index to combine environmental impact with well-being to measure the environmental efficiency with which country by country, people live long and happy lives. The second compilation of the global HPI, published in July 2009, shows that we are still far from achieving sustainable well-being and puts forward a vision of what we need to do to get there.

The Index doesn’t reveal the ‘happiest’ country in the world. It shows the relative efficiency with which nations convert the planet’s natural resources into long and happy lives for their citizens. The nations that top the Index aren’t the happiest places in the world, but the nations that score well show that achieving, long, happy lives without over-stretching the planet’s resources is possible.

The HPI shows that around the world, high levels of resource consumption do not reliably produce high levels of well-being, and that it is possible to produce high well-being without excessive consumption of the Earth’s resources. It also reveals that there are different routes to achieving comparable levels of well-being. The model followed by the West can provide widespread longevity and variable life satisfaction, but it does so only at a vast and ultimately counter-productive cost in terms of resource consumption.”

The emphases in the above statements are ours.  We wanted to point out some parallels with our own thinking and how that relates back to us project managers.  Resource, resource, resource, has almost replaced the PM mantra communicate, communicate, communicate, especially when it comes to one of the more important concepts in green project management, and of enterprise project management, protecting and efficiently using limited project resources.  Project resources in the case of green project management include environmental resources.

I was especially interested in the map detailing the environmental footprint.  Interesting to note that the most developed nations, US, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand had the largest footprint, as much as 4 planets worth.  It says a couple of things; (1) those developed countries have the resources to reduce their footprint if they have the inclination and (2) developing countries are going to have lots and lots of projects to do, building and upgrading infrastructure being one of them.

Because projects use resources, projects are where ideas become real, and project managers implement the reality, projects will have to move forward cautiously so as not to follow the “West” model.  So what can be done about reducing and controlling the environmental footprint?  That’s what we are hoping to provide with our book and blogs, the information for the project manager to lead the effort because Assertion 1 says “A project run with green intent is the right thing to do, but it also helps the project team to do things right.”

In our book, we were lucky enough to work with an EPA scientist on our chapter on Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), and put projects in the broader sense of their outcomes and the longer-term operation of the project’s product.

But…you can read our book to get more about that…

What we’re writing about today is a resource we think you’ll like.

It’s free.

It’s simple.

It’s educational.

It’s from Sustainable Minds, creators of software which helps designers kick off their projects with the long-term thinking that we discuss in our book.

We got to see their software in action as applied by students at the Rhode Island School of Design, in very nice presentation by Craig Provost of that school.

Co-founders Dave and Rich attended an educator’s conference this week at Sustainable Minds’ headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

And so…on to the resource.  Sustainable Minds is providing a free webinar on the subject of the Life Cycle Assessment and how their software works in this area.  We think that as project managers you should avail yourself of the opportunity to learn about this.

Here’s a description:

Through this orientation and software demonstration, learn about EcoDesign and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and see what’s inside the software.

The webinar is scheduled for 27-July, 2PM to 3PM Eastern US time, and will have live participation from experts at Sustainable Minds.  It will be repeated each Tuesday.

Here is the link:

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/985394193

Enjoy!

What green will you find at a liquor store?

…we know you’re probably thinking:

• Midori (which, by the way is the Japanese word for green)
• Heineken bottles
• Crème de Menthe

and that’s good.  But that’s not what we’re thinking.

We’re thinking about the 602-panel solar roof of Luke’s Super Liquors in West Yarmouth, Massachusetts (Cape Cod).  We’re thinking about the 182 kW of power it’s capable of generating.  And, of course, we’re thinking about the number of projects triggered like this one at Luke’s, especially in the last two years, by government subsidies, on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, the USA, and worldwide.  And we think about the opportunities that abound for the project managers savvy enough to learn the technologies, the language, and the benefits of green energy.

From this article in the Cape Cod Times, we quote:

Solar panels are covering rooftops on schools, homes and businesses, marking a shift not only in how the region gets its energy but also in opportunities for contractors. Since 2002, almost five megawatts of state-subsidized solar power have been planned on the Cape and Islands, most of it in the past two years, according to the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center.

The story goes on to say:

“This will be the largest one we’ve done,” said Pat Edwards of Middleboro, Beaumont Solar’s project manager, on Tuesday as he looked down on iridescent blue panels being installed on Luke’s Super Liquor Store in West Yarmouth. Beaumont — a New Bedford-based sign company — has embraced solar as an opportunity for the company to use existing skills and equipment, Edwards said.

Beaumont has installed several large systems on the Cape already.

“You’ve got to change with the times,” Edwards said.

Beaumont’s president, Phillip Cavallo, started taking on renewable energy projects after he bought the company four years ago. The company’s 21 employees now work on solar projects 80 percent of the time and signs 20 percent of the time, Cavallo said.

Engineering and construction companies are evolving rapidly to fill the niche partly created by incentives and policies that encourage renewable energy projects, said Marybeth Campbell, workforce development program director for the Clean Energy Center.

“We’ve seen in the last year-and-a-half a huge explosion,” she said, adding that the number of companies doing photovoltaic installations has jumped from 25 to 200, with more than 1,000 people doing the work statewide.

So once again – at the intersection of green and project management, this time we found not only opportunity, but a really good craft summer ale.  More on that in  later post.

Read the whole story here.